The week the system admitted it

It's been a long time coming...

I posted a video last week. Just BBC clips, four young people saying there aren't enough jobs, with me cutting in to say this isn't a bad year, it's the bottom rung of the ladder going away. It did better than anything I've put out. Which tells you something, and I'll come back to what.

Here is the video if you want to see it.

Then on Wednesday the government's own review landed and said the quiet part out loud.

Alan Milburn, former health secretary, running a government-commissioned review into youth unemployment. The interim report came out on the 28th. The number everyone quoted was £125bn a year, which is what the crisis costs the country once you add up lost taxes and higher health and welfare spend. That's more than England spends on education. It's a big, attention-grabbing figure and it did its job, it got the headlines.

But the number isn't the bit that mattered to me. The bit that mattered was why he says it's happening.

Milburn put it down to a shortage of entry-level jobs and, his words, a failure of a system stuck in the past. A NEET figure of just over a million 16-to-24-year-olds, highest in twelve years, one in eight of that age group. And the cause he names first, before anything else, is that the bottom of the ladder isn't there any more.

That's the thing I've been banging on about. So have a lot of other people, to be fair, I'm not claiming I spotted it. What's new is that it's now in a government-commissioned review rather than a LinkedIn post or a bloke talking over BBC clips. When the system commissions a report and the report says the system is broken, that's worth a pause.

Now, I want to be straight about what the report actually says, because it would be easy to grab the half that suits me and run. Milburn doesn't say AI ate the jobs. He says young people are now more likely to be economically inactive than unemployed, and he links a lot of that inactivity to anxiety, depression, and neurodevelopmental conditions. Health is central to his story. So it's not a clean "the robots did it" line, and anyone who tells you it is hasn't read past the headline.

Here's how I'd hold both at once. The entry-level rung was already thinning, that's the structural bit, and AI is accelerating it. And when the first rung goes, you don't just lose a job. You lose the place where an eighteen-year-old learns to turn up, take feedback, be part of something, get a bit of confidence. Take that away and of course the health numbers get worse. The two things aren't competing explanations. They're the same wound from two angles. The floor goes, and then the people who'd have been standing on it start to struggle in every other way too.

Which brings me to the part I find genuinely uncomfortable, and I'd be a fraud if I skipped it.

I build the tools that do some of this. I run a company that automates the coordinating-and-admin layer of a business, the stuff a junior used to cut their teeth on. I sell it because it works and because the maths for the business owner is obvious. And then I write things like this, arguing that we're hollowing out the rung that teaches people how to work. Both of those are true at the same time and I haven't found a way to make them stop being true. I'm not going to pretend the tension resolves. It doesn't. The honest position is to keep naming it rather than pick the comfortable half.

So what do I actually think we do.

I don't think it's interview training, which is what a couple of people suggested when I posted the video. Teaching someone to present better is a fine answer to "two candidates, one job." It's no answer at all to "the job's gone." You can coach somebody brilliantly for a role that no longer exists and they still don't get it. The polish helps at the margin. The margin isn't the problem.

And I don't think it's the thing politicians reach for either, which is another funding pot and another scheme. Milburn's report nods at organisations that used to do this work and got defunded, and someone pointed me at The Challenge, which folded in 2019. That matters. But pouring money into reintegration after the fact is treating the symptom. The thing that's broken is upstream: we've stopped building the first step, and we're surprised people can't climb.

If I'm honest I don't have the tidy answer to put here. I've got a direction, which is that you can't fix the top of a ladder when the bottom's missing, and most of what's being proposed is top-of-the-ladder stuff. That's about as far as I've got. I'll keep working on it out loud.

Last thing, on why the video did well. It wasn't my commentary. It was the BBC clips. The reach belongs to the topic, not to me, and it's worth being clear-eyed about that. But the topic is getting reach because a lot of people can feel this even if they can't name it yet. A government review naming it is one more sign the ground's already moved. The naming usually comes a good while after the moving.